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Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Ironic that many of the folks here (myself included) are in the business of charging extra for packets of data by building SaaS. Our goal is to "commoditize our complements:" We want to extract all the value from the chain and have the hardware vendor, the OS vendor, the browser vendor, and the carriers all become commodities surviving on a tiny margin on top of their costs and slitting each other's throats.

It seems AT&T want to charge more for packets that have more value. Or putting it in another way, they're performing a kind of price discrimination. All things we like to do, we just don't want them done to us :-)

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I agree - phone companies must intercept your phone calls and your internet traffic and charge extra money when you use it for business. Excellent suggestion, thank you!

Hahaha. If only you knew... In Canada at least, they charge more for a business landline with unlimited local calls than they charge for a residential landline with unlimited local calls.

Sounds exactly like what you suggest :-)

It is same in many other countries too, just because business phones are used much more often. It also hard to reuse such phone number, which is listed in many places: it will be "hot" for years.

Now, it is time to validate your home landline phone. Are you really doing no business over it? ;-)

I suggest that the cost to provide the service is either exactly the same thanks to amortization of equipment or only marginally higher for a small business with a single line.

Everything else is just the way they create price discrimination and exploit the customers' perception of value, much the same way that Microsoft have sixty-three jillion versions of Windows.

In Russia we do the same, but the important distinction is that generally SLAs differ too. Companies require (and expect) better level of service and tech support, so they pay more. Also, from what I've heard — comparing to natural persons — companies cause a bit more work for accounting departments.

Note: I don't know about telephony (they do charge more, but I don't know about their SLAs), but it is true for ISPs (I work for one as a programmer).

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